Sunday, January 4, 2015

“Police shoot, kill [X].”
It’s the formula for an all too formulaic event. I’ve read it hundreds of times;
so have you. Google News returns 19300
results when you search for it. It would be wrong to say, though, that one
has read the formula “Police shoot, kill [X]” hundreds of times. I haven’t, at
least. I realized this upon encountering this headline a few days ago: “Police
Officers in South Jersey Shoot, Kill Man During Traffic Stop.” Normally I
would click through, accumulate information about the event, and become angrier
and angrier at cops who kill and the journos who invariably carry their
water.(Consider the first sentence: “A
traffic stop turned deadly overnight in South Jersey.” Serving as the
grammatical subject of the sentence, it as if the traffic stop mutated of
itself, as if the stop itself turned itself into something else. The scenario
absorbs agency and de-localizes responsibility.) This time, though, the formula
arrested my attention. I don’t know why.

“Police shoot, kill [X].” We
might consider it a masterstroke of journalistic economy. Not only does it
communicate a great deal of information, but it economizes the communiqué by
truncating the relationship between shooting and killing. Grammar itself
becomes the grammar of the event: a comma links the event of shooting and the
event of killing. “Police shoot, kill [X].” Rhetoricians might call this
diazeugma, a figure of speech wherein a single subject controls multiple verbs.
It’s not, though: “shoot, kill” has achieved the status of a legal doublet
(like “aid and abet” or “cease and desist”), and so functions as a complex but
functionally unitary verb. The comma marks the complexity of a unitary process,
then, but it does so by leaving unremarked the substantive relations between
the terms. The formula is unreadable because it gives nothing to be read,
substituting the contingency of apposition—even if this contingency, this
being-beside-one-another, of “shoot, kill” seems ineluctable—for a reasoned
articulation of the terms.

And so I found myself, as I
encountered the formula, generating a list of the possible relations that the
formula’s skeletal structure makes articulable but occludes.

Police shoot, kill [X].

Police shoot and kill [X].

Police shoot and happen to
kill [X].

Police shoot and therefore
kill [X].

Police shoot and
accidentally kill [X].

Police shoot without intending
to kill [X].

Police shoot because they
intended to kill [X].

Police shoot because they
needed to kill [X].

Police shoot, and therefore
[X] was right to be killed.

When police shoot, they
kill.

When police shoot, they can
kill.

When police can shoot, they
kill.

When police shoot, they
sometimes kill.

When police shoot, they
sometimes don’t kill.

When police shoot, they
intend to kill.

When police shoot, they
sometimes intend to kill.

When police shoot, they
don’t always intend to kill.

This list is hardly
exhaustive. The skeletal quality of the formula “Police shoot, kill [X]” means
that there is a nearly infinite number of ways that the relationship between
shooting and killing could be enfleshed. We might say, then, that part of the
formula’s work is to evacuate the event of any reason in the anticipation of reason’s
post hoc construction. The forensic examination, the testimonies, the
administrative review, sometimes the grand jury, sometimes the trial, and
definitely us, as we read newspaper articles and debate on Twitter or Facebook:
the formula incites us, all of us, to acts of post hoc reconstructive
reasoning. And so we read past the headline, through it, in order to begin the
work of articulating and adjudicating the contingent but ineluctable
co-presence of shooting and killing. “Police shoot, kill [X]”: let the inquest
begin. Just keep reading.

The problem, though, is that
some of the possible ways by which the skeletal formula might be enfleshed are
administrative and legal impossibilities
for U.S. cops. Consider, for instance, “Police shoot without intending to kill
[X].” It is inadmissible. If a cop feels himself or the public to be so
threatened that shooting a gun is required, the administrative rule is always
shoot to kill. (Indeed, it is when cops shoot and don’t kill that something has gone wrong—not legally, but practically.
They missed.) Cops have roundly rejected shoot-to-wound
initiatives, and they have had the Supreme Court on their side. With Graham v. Connor, the court ruled that
the “objective reasonableness” of a cop’s use of force determined the legality
of that use of force. Legally, this means that the 4th Amendment
(with the protections it affords against “unreasonable searches and seizures”)
trumps the due process clauses of the 5th and 14th Amendments
(which the plaintiff cited as the basis of his legal beef). One is not entitled
to due process in the scene of the law’s enforcement; due process always comes
before and after. The juridical void that attends the evacuation of due process
from the scene of enforcement is instead filled in with what cops determine to
be reasonable (or unreasonable).

This is in part why it’s
impossible to indict a cop. But it’s not just that the cops have “leeway”
or that the system “protects” them. Rather, retroactive attempts to determine
the legality of a police shooting shatter upon the realization that it is the
cop himself who determines the legality of the force they apply.Police supply the legal rule. But this rule turns
out not to be law but situational reason. As Rehnquist
put it in the court’s opinion on Graham,
the very dictates of situational reason refuse regularization or formalization:

"The ‘reasonableness’
of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a
reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the 20/20 vision of hindsight…The
calculus of reasonableness must embody allowance for the fact that police
officers are often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that
are tense, uncertain and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is
necessary in a particular situation.” And earlier, citing a previous case, he
notes, “The test of reasonableness is not capable of precise definition or
mechanical application."

There is no canon of cop
reason, but reason is all cops have. If there’s a bad shoot, cops haven’t so
much broken the law as they have acted unreasonably. But we can’t know if they
acted unreasonably, because the reason of hindsight differs from “the
perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene.” We’re not cops, and
certainly not the cops who were there. The activity of policing assembles a
present asymptotic with law’s time, but it does so through the law: the provision against unreasonable search and
seizure becomes legally grounded on the fluid, flexible, formless reason of
cops.

Police render law
inoperative in the act of enforcing it. And so the truth of the formula “Police
shoot, kill [X],” which incites us to interpretive reason by its very refusal
to articulate the relationship between its terms. When police shoot, kill,
there is nothing legally judicable in the event—not for we who weren’t there,
for we who aren’t cops. For us, there doesn’t need to be a legal or even
reasonable connection between the components the event, because it is the
inaccessible, incommunicable rationality of police that articulates them. The
comma serves as an index of law’s presence at the event of its enforcement: it
is there, but silent, a mark without semantic value, a connection that cannot
speak what it connects because the cop’s reason will improvise the articulation
each time, every time. Not an aporia of law but a sign of law’s infinite
malleability. It just isn’t malleable for most of us.

Let’s take the comma, then,
as an incitement to move beyond normative idioms when relating to police
violence. The police are unencumbered by any superordinate normativity; they
give the law to themselves and to us through their situational reason. In this
situation, police violence can only
appear as a hyper-contingent materialization of force—because that is all it
is. Police shoot, kill. You get it in the headline, and it’s all we need to know.